Category: General

12/May/2004

New mailman version

I’m so glad mail.gnome.org now has a new version of Mailman that I needed to say
thanks publicly to whomever did the upgrade. I’ve switched from having to deal
with 60/70 (mostly) spam messages per mailing list I manage, to only having like
3 or 4 per list, thanks to the filters you can set up, and thus discard all messages
coming from given addresses. My life as a mailing list admin is now much better
than before.

29/April/2004

GNOME Love

I imported yesterday gjobs
into GNOME CVS. This is just a skeleton of a simple and HIG-compliant frontend to
the crontab command, that is, a tool to manage scheduled
jobs.

This is intended to be a skeleton for gnome-love people to pick up the development. I hope
this succeeds, as it is happening with the GNOME
Keyring Manager project. As a start point, I added a list of things
that need to be done, which I’ll reproduce here so that everybody can see
how easy it is to do this tool:

  • Implement reading from the user’s crontab (that can be done by parsing
    the output of ‘crontab -l’, which AFAIK should be standard over all
    supported platforms). This is to be done in src/crontab.[ch].
  • Display the list of scheduled jobs retrieved from crontab in the list
    view in the main window. Some thoughts should be put on how to display
    the ‘When’ information. crontab stores day of week, day of month, month,
    hour and minute. Not sure if we should display all that or just a
    human-readable string (“first sundays on all months”, etc).
  • Implement writing the user’s crontab. This can be done again via the
    crontab command, which accepts gets its standard input as the contents
    of the crontab file.
  • Implement the ‘add’ and ‘properties’ buttons. These should open the same
    dialog, to allow adding new entries or edit existing entries in the
    crontab file.
  • Implement the ‘remove’ button. This should just remove the entry from the
    crontab.

22/April/2004

Photos

Got the memory card on my camera full, so I had to upload the photos I took while
having Arturo visiting here, which are now
available: some from the visit we did to the Moncayo
Peak, others from Pamplona.
Also had some photos from the last time I went to ski this year (the season is now
finished here 🙁 ), to Arette,
in France, pretty close to where I live.

Desktop integration

Very nice to see Damien
working on Evolution Data Server and GNOMEMeeting integration. It
is a very nice step into the whole desktop integration.

19/April/2004

GNOME Development Platform

All the comments from the Mono/Java discussion recently have made a lot of people
be paranoid about the future of GNOME (I’m not naming those people, sorry :-).
I’ve heard in the last few weeks a lot of complaints, not about the decision,
which hasnt been made yet and wont for a while I guess, but about the conversation
taking place. And one of those complaints I’ve heard is that “GNOME
does not need a new development platform“.

I am myself not sure what is the best way yet, but of course I am not blind enough
to not see that we really need a better development platform, maybe not for the
most experienced hackers, but for new developers. People missing this fundamental
point are missing the whole point of the conversation, and probably have never dealt
with libtool, autoconf, automake, etc. Be it Java, Mono, C/Python,
a custom thing or the the
new D programming language, it’s clear we need a better development
platform to attract new developers. If someone still doesnt believe so, please come
see me, I’ve got a few bugs to fix that involve using our hyper-advanced-dont-need-changes
super platform.

GNOME-DB

Spent some time this weekend going over some patches and bug reports for libgda
and libgnomedb, and ended up doing the 1.0.4
release, which should have been out much sooner (it’s been 3 months since
1.0.3).

Also, on the reporting front, seems some stuff might come out from the merging of Papyrus and the libgda report
API/engine. I hope at last this is, once for all, the definitive step to have the reporting
stuff working in libgda/libgnomedb.

11/April/2004

Weekend

Just left Arturo at the
bus station, to get back to Madrid. It’s been a very nice weekend, doing tourism over
to Pamplona, Tarazona and the Moncayo Peak.

Longhorn delay

It seems
that Microsoft’s Longhorn is delaying again, and, what is most important, some of the
announced features might be clipped to not delay its release anymore. This gives GNOME,
I guess, a lot of advantage over Microsoft.

In that article above, it says: “We are going to focus on doing fewer things,
and doing them well“. Are they copying us? Maybe we’ll see Windows versions
every 6 months?

8/April/2004

GUADEC-ES

It seems the Spanish
GUADEC is going to get a lot of newbie attendees, willing to be GNOME
hackers. This is a very good opportunity to get new blood, given the Linux/GNOME adoption in
Extremadura (where the event is taking place), so I guess all GNOME people that
can attend should go and try to do some tutorial-like talk.

Visit

I expect Arturo‘s
visit tomorrow. He’s staying in Madrid
for a few weeks and will come visit over here a couple of days. It’s going to be quite
funny, since I’ll bring him to see Pamplona, for some tourist sightseeing and
a lot of beers and tapas.

25/March/2004

GNOME 2.8

With GNOME 2.6 not out yet, plans for GNOME 2.8 are already starting. First interesting
thing, at least for me, is Alex’s work on the GNOME-VFS network:// module, which will
be using service discovery APIs to discover servers in the network. This is something
that I’ve wanted for a long time, but had never got the time to work on it, so it’s
really nice to see Alex starting work on it.

Also, on the personal front, I’m waiting for the right time to propose GNOME
Netinfo‘s inclusion in GNOME 2.8 (screenshots here).
It is a full featured application, much much better than the application it was
initially based on (Mac OS X’s network utils tool).

GNOME Programming Language

After following all comments about the “need” of a high-level language
for GNOME, I’d thought about giving my 2 cents. I really don’t think we need
to apply on a single language, be it Java, C# or whatever, we really should
continue to allow anyone to use any language. What would be really interesting
though would be to have that common runtime that both Java and Mono provide.
This, if it were done to be used from any language (like Mono does), will help us in reducing the
work needed for creating bindings (or even removing that need at all, since we’ll
just have to add support for new languages to access the runtime, giving them
access automatically to all features in the runtime).

I think that’s the interesting bit, and something we should really think about. We really
need to have
easily accessible all GTK/GNOME APIs to all languages, with no delay (as it happens
now with bindings, which are released almost always some time after the C library).
Automatic creation of bindings could be a good solution for the time being, although
that seems, from what I’ve heard, a bit complicated, given that human intervention is
needed in a lot of cases.

About development tools, even though I don’t like at all IDE’s (at least the ones I’ve used,
many years ago), it is another thing we should put efforts on. Anjuta seems to be loved
by new Linux developers (that’s what I’ve heard), and if it continues (as I know it does)
to just integrate into the development tools we already use (automake, autoconf, cvs,
and our beloved libtool), I think it can be the perfect entry point for new developers
right now. For the future, whenever we change the development tools, we should make sure
we always have an easy-to-use IDE that makes use of all those development tools. If
that IDE hides the (probable) complexity of the development tools, then the new developers
don’t really need to learn lots of obscure stuff.

Multimedia frustration on SuSE

Everything works as expected on SuSE, except, at least for me, the Totem and
Rhythmbox packages from the xd-unstable channel. Rhythmbox can’t play more than
one song and Totem sometimes says it doesn’t have plugins for formats it was
playing correctly before 🙁 Of course, since I was a (very) happy user of those
2 applications on Debian, everything points to the Ximian (unstable) packages
being broken. So, to solve it, I’ve been trying to install the totem/rhythmbox
versions from other Red Carpet channels, with no luck at all. Is there some
Swedish conspiracy against SuSE or what?